Do we see more than we can access?

Ramadan fasting: Do we need more evidence?

Over a billion of Muslims fast worldwide during Ramadan each year. Through this religious custom, fasting contributes to their health as well as their spiritual growth. However, available evidence regarding the health-benefits of Ramadan fasting is scarce and highly contentious. Although Islam exempts patients from fasting, many fast conceivably, and their clinical condition is prone to deterio...

Social Systems: Can We Do More Than Just Poke Friends?

Social sites have become extremely popular among users but have they attracted equal attention from the research community? Are they good only for simple tasks, such as tagging and poking friends? Do they present any new or interesting research challenges? In this paper, we describe the insights we have obtained implementing CourseRank, a course evaluation and planning social system. We argue t...

Extending Nonaka’s Knowledge Creation Theory: How We Know More than We Can Tell & Tell More than We Can Know

Nonaka and colleagues propose a theory of knowledge creation grounded in the epistemology of Michael Polanyi. However, both Nonaka (and colleagues) and Polanyi tend to leave part of the epistemology of collaborative knowledge creation unaccounted for. As a remedy we introduce the notion of knowledge as “unfathomable” (Bartley, 1987), rooted in the Popperian idea of “objective knowledge” (Popper...

When can we do better than autarky?

This paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nonautarkic contract in a risk sharing model with two-sided lack of commitment. Verifying the condition takes just one Gaussian elimination of a matrix. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Can we do better than dobutamine?